Drum Wrap: Remembering The Iron Lady

Vale Margaret Thatcher: one of the most influential political figures of the 20th Century?

Reuters: Roy Letkey

Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's death is no ordinary political passing.

Thatcher was loved and hated for her politics, but almost universally admired for her rise from daughter of a grocer to the first - and so far only - woman to unpack at 10 Downing Street as Britain's leader.

She remained a towering character until she died peacefully yesterday following a stroke, aged 87.

"I don't think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime," Margaret Thatcher said in 1973, when she was education secretary.

Six years later she was Britain's leader, and went on to be "one of the most influential political figures of the 20th Century", according to the BBC.

Her legacy had a profound effect upon the policies of her successors, both Conservative and labour, while her radical and sometimes confrontational approach defined her 11-year period at no 10.

...her speech laid out a simple conservative argument for taking environmental action: "It may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now," she said, "than to wait and find we have to pay much more later." Global warming was, she argued, "real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.

Her key role - along with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev - in ending the Cold War is credited with "transforming the geopolitics of the world".

She was also the first to identify a Soviet politician who grasped the hard reality that his country could not win the Cold War. While still only a member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev visited Britain in December 1984 and met Mrs Thatcher at Chequers. Afterwards, she declared: "I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together."

In the Falkland Islands, too, Thatcher's war to evict Argentina from the British islands in 1982 was popular with voters and led to a landslide election victory the following year.

The war had at times divided Britain, but supporters argue that it also changed Britain's image of itself 25 years after the humiliation of the Suez crisis, as later military interventions in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Libya have shown.

But for many, Thatcherism - particularly her legacy of free markets, competition, low tax and free trade - led to class struggles that left Britain deeply divided. Her government's clash with British coal miners in 1984 flagged the industry's decline, and put thousands out of work.

No where better was this anger and political abandonment articulated than in the music of the era when artists like Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Billy Bragg and The Jam vented their anger in song.

"That's when they finally put you in the ground/I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down," sang Elvis Costello on his 1989 album Spike.

Even in death, many can not forgive her. In The Daily Beast, Morrissey has written that "every move she made was charged by negativity".

... she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out.

Thatcher's history-making role as Britain's first female prime minister remains just as influential as her politics.

Although she claimed not to be a feminist - "I owe nothing to Women's Lib", "The battle for women's rights has been largely won" - many continue to see her political success as a beacon of female achievement and possibility.